You know that I had heard so many times people say things like, ‘You could never write ‘Harry Potter’ and have it be about Harriett Potter because nobody would read it; people only want to read an adventure story if it’s about a boy,’ and I thought, ‘I don’t think that’s true.’
Getting a role in ‘Harry Potter’ was like winning the lottery. But no one deserves an acting job.
I am fortunate that I get sent scripts and get to meet people I would never have met had I not done ‘Harry Potter.’ But I feel I had to come out of that show and prove that I am not a one trick pony and can do other stuff.
I love Harry Styles. He’s one of the nicest people in the entire world.
Let me tell you the first president to recognize the state of Israel was Harry Truman, a Democrat and every president since, Democrat and Republican, has stood closely with Israel.
I signed with Columbia for two reasons. One reason I saw two of Frank Capra s pictures in Paris, and I want to work with him. Then at Columbia, in Harry Cohn, there is only one judge to please. I could not face the juries of fourteen that I have heard about at so many large studios.
We can suspend disbelief about Harry Potter, and we do the same thing with God, and we do the same thing with human rights, and we do the same thing with money.
We’re always looking for ways to extend all of our intellectual property. We’ve seen that’s what happened with ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings.’
Harry Styles threw a cream pie at my face in front of 15,000 people to thank me for the months we spent on the road.
As a teenager, I really loved Catherine Ribeiro – extremely powerful, wild, improvisatory voice. I loved old psych-rock bands, and Michael Hurley, and Harry Nilsson. And then later on I discovered the famous European singer Demis Roussos, who used to be in Aphrodite’s Child.
‘Harry Potter’ is very nice because it’s very easy to make children happy. All you have to do is have your photograph taken with them.
J. K. Rowling’s first ‘Harry Potter’ manuscript was rejected 12 times. Stephen King’s ‘Carrie’ was rejected 30 times. ‘Gone With The Wind’ was rejected 38 times. I was immensely proud to have beaten them all.
When I found out that I’m playing Nagini, I thought it was meaningful because it’s an important character in the ‘Harry Potter’ series. ‘Harry Potter’ is a franchise film with many Caucasian actors, so I thought many Korean viewers would be happy.
And of course I’ve got kids of my own now, and they love me being in the Harry Potter films. I’m now part of a phenomenon. You become incredibly cool to your kids, and you get a young fan base. So you became the cool dad at school. You’re suddenly hip.
I will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don’t know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.
‘Harry Potter’ really harnessed the imagination of so many young-adult minds, and it’s the same with the ‘Divergent’ series.
I’ve grown up being obsessed by ‘Harry Potter.’
Gene Krupa was my big hero, and I used to play on my mother’s flour cans and sugar cans with the kitchen knives, listening to the big bands on my dad’s records. Gene Krupa and Harry James.
Harry Potter was my first job.
The moment I said I’d finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who’d got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I’d written Harry Potter. That would have been why.
I’m the gun guy, a loud guitar Dirty Harry with a ponytail.
When I was younger, I had a lot of Harry Enfield and Chums stuff – audiobooks and books and videos – so it was amazing to work with him.
I actually have a young readers’ series that I wanna do, kind of in the same lane as a Harry Potter or Narnia or Twilight. I want to write stuff like that.
I rate Fabien Barthez and played with two great keepers in Alex Stepney and Harry Gregg.
I am a really big Harry Potter fan and I’ve seen all the sets, I’ve lived Harry Potter and I don’t think it’s destroyed the books at all, I think it’s really spot on.
I think back to some of the things Harry said and some of the things I said trying to be funny. If I said them now, it would be on the front page of every newspaper in the country.
Shaft was a pop culture figure along t he lines of, I guess, Dirty Harry – except that he wasn’t as much of a racist. So yeah, I was always a fan.
It fell to President Harry Truman to contain Soviet expansionism. He built America’s first peacetime alliances, starting in Western Europe, then in Asia.
99.9% of the time, the people we see worked for it. People like Morgan Freeman and Harry Connick, Jr. work every day to continue the status that they have.
I think Democrats made a mistake running away from liberalism. Liberalism, uh, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John and Robert Kennedy – that’s what the Democratic party ought to reach for.
I never talk about ‘Harry Potter’ because I think that would rob children of something that’s private to them. I think too many things get explained, so I hate talking about it.
Harry Kane, for example, is a really physical striker but also really skilful. He surprises lot of defenders, but he won’t surprise me.
For me, the biggest thing was writing memorable themes for the new characters so that ultimately people would have the same identification with ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them’ as they do with the Harry Potter films.
I’d say Rob Reiner’s ‘When Harry Met Sally’ is my all-time favorite. It made me realize there’s a way of telling a story where the audience is so in love with the characters that they forget you’re even telling a story.
I like Disney stuff. No-one looks at ‘Toy Story’ and says,’ Oh, that’s just for kids.’ Why is it that games can only appeal to a certain audience, but movies and books – I mean, how many adults read ‘Harry Potter?’
‘Harry Potter’ changed my life in more ways than one, and it helped me get through my mother’s death.
In ‘Night Court,’ my name is still Harry, and I’m – my best friends are still three-card monte workers, and I still have spring snakes hidden everywhere and joy buzzers, but I’m the judge.
If Obama’s vision of the public sector is socialism, then so too were the visions of Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon.
Something that I’ve definitely taken on when I think of my style icons – people like Harry Styles and the way he’s managed to bring a femininity to his masculinity – is that that’s definitely the way that we’re moving as men going into 2021.
But I can’t imagine Harry being a stockbroker at 35. That doesn’t really seem the stuff of ‘Harry Potter’.
I’d like to do something with Michael Buble, Harry Connick Jr., Tim McGraw, Justin Timberlake, and Gwen Stefani.
I didn’t learn much about writing at Sarah Lawrence, but I learned a lot about the sources of poems – dreams, myth, history – from the really great teachers, Joseph Campbell, Charles Trinkhaus, Bert Loewenberg, and a young Australian anthropologist named Harry Hawthorne.
And the film that I’ve seen a million times is ‘When Harry Met Sally’ with Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal, and directed by Rob Reiner.
It’s not the easiest thing in the world to act with Harry – we are very close. I’m not saying it won’t ever happen again but it’s best to work with other people. There are no professional boundaries at which to stop when you act with a sibling.
President Obama and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi represent what mainstream America is rejecting about Washington, D.C. And that is this out of touch with the people.
Dirty Harry, for example. Clint Eastwood was not a rogue cop. He was a maverick cop, but he was a good guy.
I turned down ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Spider-Man,’ two movies that I knew would be phenomenally successful, because I had already made movies like that before and they offered no challenge to me. I don’t need my ego to be reminded.
I could be 100 years old and in my rocker, but I’ll still be very proud that I was part of the ‘Harry Potter’ films.
I’ve never seen anything so abhorrent in my life as Harry Reid. He’s an equal opportunity basher. He goes after everybody, and I think it has been so, frankly, disgusting.
So Harry Potter came in and it is nice that I have kids of the right age. I took them to London and they walked around the set and met Harry Potter and that is thrilling.
You might have noticed Harry Reid is a little upset with Americans for Prosperity. Let me tell you, when the Democrat leader is complaining about you on the Senate floor, you know you are doing something right.
My uncle gave me a trumpet, but I loved the Louis Armstrong sound and the Harry James sound and I played by ear and I played always soulful or very direct from the gut.
I read fantasy books like the Harry Potter books, ‘Twilight,’ also biographies, and I like to read about people who have been through stuff like wars or lost their families – real life stuff, you know? I like to read about their experiences and how they coped with that.
The more powerful you become, the less likely it is that people will tell you the truth. It must be why the ‘Harry Potter’ books become so bloated as the series progresses; think of the beautiful, precise editing of books 1-3 drowned in a mire of sycophancy and yea-saying.
